During the last thirty years many structural control concepts have been proposed for the reduction of the structural response caused by earthquake excitations. Their research and implementation in practice have shown that seismic control of structures has a lot of potential but also many limitations. In this paper the importance of two practical issues, time delay and saturation effect, on the performance of controlled structures, is discussed. Their influence, both separately and in interaction, on the response of structures controlled by a modified pole placement algorithm is investigated. Characteristic buildings controlled by this algorithm and subjected to dynamic loads, such as harmonic signals and actual seismic events, are analyzed for a range of levels of time delay and saturation capacity of the control devices. The response reduction surfaces for the combined influence of time delay and force saturation of the controlled buildings are obtained. Conclusions regarding the choice of the control system and the desired properties of the control devices are drawn.